The End of the Beginning

At a turning-point in the Second World War, someone asked Winston
Churchill whether the battle marked the beginning of the end. And he
replied, famously, no, but it might be the end of the beginning. With
the Iraq War, the world is marking the end of the beginning of the new
world disorder that has replaced the world order dominated by the
United States from 1945 to 2001.

In 1945, the United States emerged from the Second World War with so
much power in every domain that it quickly established itself as the
hegemonic power of the world-system and imposed a series of structures
on the world-system to ensure that it functioned according to the
wishes of the United States. The key institutions in this construction
were the United Nations Security Council, the World Bank and IMF, and
the Yalta arrangements with the Soviet Union.

What enabled the United States to put these structures in place were
three things: 1) the overwhelming edge in economic efficiency of
U.S.-based productive enterprises; 2) the network of
alliances—especially NATO and the US-Japan Security
Treaty—which guaranteed automatic political support of
U.S. positions in the U.N. and elsewhere, reinforced by an ideological
rhetoric (the “free world”) to which the allies of the
U.S. were as committed as it was; and 3) a preponderance in the
military sphere based on U.S. control of nuclear weapons, combined
with the so-called ”balance of terror” with the Soviet
Union which ensured that neither side in the so-called Cold War would
use these nuclear weapons against the other.

This system worked very well at first. And the U.S. got what it wanted
95% of the time, 95% of the way. The only hitch was the resistance of
those Third World countries not included in the benefits. The most
notable cases were China and Vietnam. It was China's entry into
the Korean War that meant that the U.S. had to satisfy itself with a
truce at the line of departure. And Vietnam in the end defeated the
United States—a dramatic shock to the U.S. position politically,
and economically as well (since it caused the end of the gold standard
and fixed rates of exchange).

An even greater blow to U.S. hegemony was the fact that, after twenty
years, both western Europe and Japan had made such strides
economically that they became roughly the economic equals of the
United States, which launched a long and continuing competition for
capital accumulation between these three loci of world production and
finance. And then came the world revolution of 1968, which
fundamentally undermined the U.S. ideological position (as well as
the spuriously oppositional Soviet ideological position).

The triple shock—the Vietnam war, the economic rise of western
Europe and Japan, and the world revolution of 1968—ended the
period of easy (and automatic) U.S. hegemony in the
world-system. U.S. decline began. The United States reacted to this
change in the geopolitical situation by an attempt to slow down this
decline as much as possible. We entered a new phase of U.S. world
policy—that conducted by all U.S. presidents from Nixon to
Clinton (including Reagan). The heart of this policy was three
objectives: 1) maintaining the allegiance of western Europe and Japan
by brandishing the continuing menace of the Soviet Union and offering
some say in decision-making (so-called “partnership” via
the Trilateral Commission and the G-7); 2) keeping the Third World
militarily helpless by trying to stanch so-called
“proliferation” of weapons of mass destruction; 3) trying
to keep the Soviet Union/Russia and China off-balance by playing one
off against the other.

This policy was moderately successful until the collapse of the Soviet
Union, which pulled the rug from under the key first objective. It was
this new post-1989 situation which permitted Saddam Hussein to risk
invading Kuwait, and enabled him to hold the United States to a truce
at the line of departure. It is this post-1989 geopolitical situation
that permitted the collapse of so many states in the Third World and
forced both the United States and western Europe to engage in
basically unwinnable attempts to prevent or eliminate fierce civil
wars.

There is one other element to put into this analysis, which is the
structural crisis of the world capitalist system. I have no space here
to argue the case, which is made in detail in my book Utopistics, or
Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century, but I will resume here
the conclusion. Because the system we have known for 500 years is no
longer able to guarantee long-term prospects of capital accumulation,
we have entered a period of world chaos—wild (and largely
uncontrollable) swings in the economic, political, and military
situations—which are leading to a systemic
bifurcation—that is, essentially a world collective choice about
the kind of new system the world will construct over the next fifty
years. The new system will not be a capitalist system, but it could be
one of two kinds: a different system that would be equally or more
hierarchical and inegalitarian; or one that will be substantially
democratic and egalitarian.

One cannot understand the politics of the U.S. hawks if one does not
understand that they are not trying to save capitalism but to replace
it with some other, even worse, system. The U.S. hawks believe that
the U.S. world policy pursued from Nixon to Clinton is today unviable
and can only lead to catastrophe. They are probably right that it is
unviable. What they wish to substitute for it in the short run is a
policy of premeditated interventionism by the U.S. military, as they
are convinced that only the most macho aggressiveness will serve their
interests. (I do not say serve U.S. interests, because I do not
believe that it does.)

The successful attack by Osama bin Laden on the United States on
Sept. 11, 2001, propelled the U.S. hawks into a position where they,
for the very first time, controlled the short-term policies of the
U.S. government. They immediately pushed the necessity of a war on
Iraq, seeing it as the first step in implementing their middle-term
program. We have arrived at that point. The war has begun. That is why
I call this the end of the beginning.

Where do we go from here? That depends in part on how the Iraq war
plays itself out. One week into the war, it is clearly going less well
than the hawks had hoped and anticipated. It seems we are likely to be
in for a long, bloody, drawn-out war. The U.S. will probably (but not
at all certainly) defeat Saddam Hussein. But its problems will only
then mount. I detailed my views on these problems in my last
commentary (Mar. 15, 2003) entitled “Bush Bets All He
Has.”

The fact that it goes badly for the U.S. hawks will make them only
more desperate. They are likely to try to push harder than ever on
their agenda, which seems to have two short-term priorities: combat
with potential Third World nuclear powers (North Korea, Iran, and
others); and establishing an oppressive police apparatus inside the
United States. They will need to win one more election to secure these
two objectives. Their economic program seems to be one that will
bankrupt the United States. Is this totally unintended? Or do they
want to weaken some of the key capitalist strata within the United
States, whom they may see as hindering the full implementation of
their program?

What is clear at this point is that the world political struggle is
sharpening. Those who cling to the U.S. world policy of the 1970-2001
period—the moderate Republicans and the Democratic Establishment
within the United States, but also in many ways the western European
opponents of the hawks (for example, both the French and the Germans),
may find themselves forced to make more painful political choices than
any they have had to make up to now. By and large, this group has
lacked middle-range clarity in their analysis of the world situation,
and they have been hoping against hope that somehow the U.S. hawks
will go away. They will not. The hawks can however be defeated.

[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is
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These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be
reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the
perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]